Tag Archives: conservatives

Chart of the Day: Universities Are Pretty Liberal Places

by cazaresighisoaraieftina Posted on January 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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The chart on the right comes from Heterodox Academy, a group founded a few months ago to promote more ideological diversity on university campuses. What it shows is unsurprising: over the past few decades, university faculties have become almost entirely liberal. And this is for all university faculty. According to HA, humanities and social science faculty are closer to 95 percent liberal.

Why? Paul Krugman thinks it’s because conservatives went nuts starting in the 80s, so nobody with any intelligence and genuine curiosity wants to associate with them anymore. Michael Strain suggests that it might be because faculties actively discriminate against conservative job candidates. This argument has been going on forever, and there are a few basic points of view:

Undergrads, especially in the humanities, are mostly liberal, which means that PhD program fill up with liberals. Conservatives just aren’t interested in the liberal arts these days, so there are very few to choose from when it comes time to hire new faculty.
Being exposed to graduate work in the humanities converts a lot of people to liberalism.
Liberal arts departments consider conservative views inherently racist/sexist/etc. and are loath to hire anyone who promotes conservative views.

Needless to say, all of these interact with each other, and more than one may be right. But here’s what I don’t get: why the endless argument? These all seem like eminently testable hypotheses:

Are undergraduate liberal arts departments predominantly filled with liberal students?
Are conservatives not much interested in the liberal arts these days? Why?
How many conservatives apply to grad programs in the liberal arts? How many are accepted?
How much do views change while in grad school?
How many conservatives end up getting PhDs in the liberal arts?
Of those, how many get tenure-track jobs?

If, say, 95 percent of job candidates are liberal, then there’s probably no discrimination. Conservatives are being hired in proportion to their numbers. If conservatives generally don’t major in the liberal arts as undergrads, then probably PhD programs aren’t discriminating either. Etc. These all seem like fairly answerable questions.

Most likely, there’s a vicious circle involved. As the American right became more conservative while the liberals arts became (say) modestly more liberal, it would make sense if conservatives just didn’t feel like joining up. This naturally produced a more left-leaning liberal arts faculty, rinse and repeat. Eventually you end up at 95 percent.

But why guess? Can’t these questions at least be suggestively answered?

For what it’s worth, I agree that it’s a problem regardless of how it happened. It’s easy for liberals to see the conservative bubble when we talk about Fox News or talk radio, and we immediately understand why it’s bad: it makes people lazy and unwilling to question their basic beliefs. We don’t see this so clearly when it’s our own bubble, but we should. Bubbles are bubbles, and ours are no better than theirs.

And now to end on a griping note: I would be a lot more sympathetic to conservative complaints about the academy if they showed an equal concern about fields that lean heavily conservative (big business, the military, etc.). For some reason, though, that never seems to strike them as a problem. Why?

Originally posted here:

Chart of the Day: Universities Are Pretty Liberal Places

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Are Liberals Responsible for the Rise of Donald Trump?

by VeldaMarcell Posted on January 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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Five-time Jeopardy! champion Tom Nichols1 writes today about why so many people are attracted to Donald Trump. Nichols is a Republican,2 but he makes it very clear that he deeply loathes Trump (“hideous,” “narcissistic,” “creepy,” “stupid,” etc.) and will never vote for him. So what’s his take on Trump’s popularity? Is it due to economic insecurity? Inchoate anger? Bubbling racism and xenophobia? Hatred of the Republican establishment?

Nah. He says Trump’s rise is basically the fault of the left:

To understand Trump’s seemingly effortless seizure of the public spotlight, forget about programs, and instead zero in on the one complaint that seems to unite all of the disparate angry factions gravitating to him: political correctness. This, more than anything, is how the left created Trump

Uh-oh. That’s not going to go over well. For what it’s worth, Nichols is clear that he isn’t referring to garden variety political correctness, which is basically little more than avoiding terms that are obviously insulting or exclusionary. At worst, that stuff is annoying but well-meaning:

Today, however, we have a new, more virulent political correctness that terrorizes both liberals and conservatives, old-line Democrats and Republicans, alike…The extremist adherents of this new political correctness have essentially taken a flamethrower to the public space and annihilated its center…Any incorrect position, any expression of the Constitutional right to a different opinion, or even just a slip of the tongue can lead to public ostracism and the loss of a job.

…Gay marriage is a good example. Liberals wanted gay marriage to win in the Supreme Court, and it did. Leftists wanted more: to silence their opponents even after those opponents completely lost on the issue…I could reel off many other examples. When the New York Times tells the rubes that it’s time to hand in their guns, when The Washington Post suggests that Jesus is ashamed of them for not welcoming Syrian refugees the week after a terrorist attack, people react not because they love guns or hate Syrians, but because their natural urge to being told by coastal liberals that they’re awful people and that they should just obey and shut up is to issue a certain Anglo-Saxon verb and pronoun combination with all the vigor they can muster. And if they can’t say it themselves, they’ll find someone who will, even if it’s a crude jerk from Queens who can’t make a point without raising his pinky like a Mafia goon explaining the vig to you after you’ve had a bad day at the track.

…For the record, I despise Donald Trump and I will vote for almost any Republican (well, okay, not Ben Carson) rather than Trump….But I understand the fear of being silenced that’s prompting otherwise decent people to make common cause with racists and modern Know-Nothings, and I blame the American left for creating that fear.

…How long this will go on, then, depends on how long it will take for those people to feel reassured that someone besides Trump will represent their concerns without backing down in the face of catcalls about racism, sexism, LGBTQ-phobia, Islamophobia, or any other number of labels deployed mostly to extinguish their dissent.

This is hardly a new critique. Conservatives have been complaining about “being silenced” forever. The only difference between Trump and the rest of the GOP field is that Trump’s complaints are a little earthier than Rubio’s or Bush’s.

Still, even if I think Nichols is overstating things, it’s not as if he doesn’t have a point. Even those of us on the left feel the wrath of the leftier-than-thou brigade from time to time. I don’t generally have a hard time avoiding objectionable language myself because (a) I’m liberal, (b) I’m good with words, and (c) I write rather than talk, which gives me time to get my act together. But even at that, sometimes I cross an invisible line and get trounced for it.

But for someone without my advantages, I can easily see how it might feel almost impossible to express an unpopular opinion without tying yourself in knots. And let’s be honest: We liberals do tend to yell racism a little more often than we should. And we do tend to suggest that anyone who likes guns or Jesus is a rube. And the whole “privilege” thing sure does get tiresome sometimes. And we do get a little pedantic in our insistence that no conversation about anything is complete unless it specifically acknowledges the special problems of marginalized groups. It can be pretty suffocating at times.

For the most part, I don’t mind this stuff—and conservatives do themselves no favors by harping on supposed PC idiocy like the “war on Christmas.” But the reason I don’t mind it is that I can navigate it reasonably well4 and I mostly agree with the aims of the PC police anyway. People who have trouble with navigation obviously feel a lot more constrained. So while I don’t really buy Nichols’ argument—conservatives built the monster named Trump, not liberals—I do think he has a germ of a point. Donald Trump is basically telling ordinary people that ordinary language is okay, and since that’s the only language they know, it means they feel like they can finally talk again.

1Okay, fine: He’s also a professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College.

2Former Republican, anyway: “I’m a conservative independent and a former Republican. I quit the party in 2012 because of exactly the kind of coarse ignorance that Trump represents. The night Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary on the thoughtful platform of colonizing the moon, I was out.”

3 I included that second sentence only because it tickled me.

4 Much of this I’ve learned from reading stuff by academics, who are the masters of acceptable language. As an example: If you were to call something “black behavior,” you’d probably get mauled. The solution? Call it “behavior stereotypically coded as black.” This accomplishes so many things at once. However, it’s also phraseology that no ordinary person would ever think of. This means they literally have no acceptable way of expressing the original thought, which makes them feel silenced.

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Are Liberals Responsible for the Rise of Donald Trump?

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American Politics Is Fueled by Ignorance and Hatred

by JosefaCorin Posted on December 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Catherine Rampell worries that Lake Wobegon-ness is wrecking America:

To an almost comical degree, Americans consistently evaluated their own personal lives and relationships as higher-quality than those of Americans writ large.

When married respondents were asked whether they believed their own marriage had gotten better or worse over the previous two years, 43 percent said stronger, 49 percent said about the same and only 6 percent said weaker.

But when those same people were asked about U.S. marriages generally, the responses flipped: Just 5 percent said they generally were getting stronger, 40 percent said about the same and 43 percent said weaker.

We see this all over the place, of course. Schools are terrible, but my local school is pretty good. Congress is hopelessly corrupt, but my representative is great. Rampell, however, thinks this is a widespread phenomenon, and it’s responsible for the dysfunction of our political system:

In a country that has become not just polarized, but also atomized; in which we root unwaveringly for our own political “teams” composed of those who look, think, vote and raise children exactly as we do; and in which we treat opposing viewpoints as motivated by malice or stupidity rather than honest disagreement, perhaps it is not so surprising that so many Americans have come down with a serious case of dictator envy, a longing for a political strongman (such as, say, Donald Trump) who will put our neighbors in their place and skirt the pluralistic niceties and nonsense of democracy.

I guess it was inevitable that this piece would somehow end with Donald Trump, since he’s the ultimate mystery to my tribe of hypereducated lefties. Still, Rampell’s point stands without him: if America’s two major tribes think the other tribe is not merely wrong, but dangerous and morally degenerate, democracy gets a lot harder. After all, the underlying prerequisite of democracy isn’t elections, it’s the peaceful transfer of power. But that only happens if both sides consider the other fundamentally legitimate and neither side fears destruction when the other side governs. If you think that Republicans are trying to enslave women’s bodies or that Democrats are secretly in league with Islamic jihadists, that peaceful transfer of power gets harder and harder.

We’re nowhere near to losing it, and the political polarization we feel today isn’t unique in American history. Unfortunately, modern media, both traditional and social, amplifies this polarization. If you watch Fox and MSNBC, you’d barely recognize that they were reporting about the same country. I come across this frequently myself when I hear about some new conservative complaint and find myself completely befuddled. What is that all about? A bit of googling usually provides an answer, and by the time it hits the blog it sounds like I’ve known about it all along. But often I haven’t. It’s been reported widely in B-list conservative outlets, but I’m pretty oblivious to those. Conservatives, however, have been getting increasingly riled up about it for months or years.

I’m perhaps not as worried about this as Rampell. Still, it’s disconcerting to know that there are so many people in both tribes who socialize solely within their own tribe and basically think of those outside it as either laughable or dangerous. It may not be the downfall of the nation, but it’s pretty unhealthy.

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American Politics Is Fueled by Ignorance and Hatred

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Big Recessions Are Good For Right-Wing Politics

by MarylouKelsall Posted on December 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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I guess today is David Dayen day. Over at the New Republic, he points me to an interesting new historical study of systemic banking crises. Here’s what happens when the financial system implodes:

Both before and after WWII, the authors find the same dynamic: the voting share of far-right parties increases by about a third and national legislatures become more fractured and dysfunctional. This doesn’t happen after normal recessions. Only after major recessions caused by a banking crisis.

Why? The authors are unsure. One possible explanation, they say, is that financial crises “may have social repercussions that are not observable after non-financial recessions. For example, it is possible that the disputes between creditors and debtors are uglier or that inequality rises more strongly….Financial crises typically involve bailouts for the financial sector and these are highly unpopular, which may result in greater political dissatisfaction.” Or maybe this: “After a crisis, voters seem to be particularly attracted to the political rhetoric of the extreme right, which often attributes blame to minorities or foreigners.”

Since we’re guessing here, I’ll add my two cents. People are, in general, more generous when times are good. Policywise, they’re more likely to approve of safety net programs that help the poor, which are generally associated with the left. But when times turn bad, people get scared and mean—and the longer the bad times last, the meaner they get. When people have lost their jobs, or had their hours cut, or seen the value of their home crash, they’re just not as sympathetic to helping out the poor. They’re looking out for their own families instead.

Politically, the result of this is pretty obvious. Liberal parties think that bad times are precisely when the poor need the most help, so they propose more social spending. Right-wing parties, by contrast, oppose increased spending.

In public, this usually isn’t framed as support or opposition to doling out money to the poor. Liberals talk about stimulus and countercyclical spending. Conservatives talk about massive budget deficits and skyrocketing government outlays. But it doesn’t really matter. What people hear is that liberals want to spend more on the poor and conservatives don’t. When people are feeling vulnerable and mean, the conservative message resonates with them.

From a practical policy standpoint, this makes little sense. Liberals are right that recessions are the best time to spend more on safety-net programs, both because the poor need the help and because it acts as useful stimulus. But human nature doesn’t work that way, and conservatives have the better read on that.

So what’s the answer? Dayen suggests that banks and bank bailouts are central to this dynamic, so we need to take a meat axe to the political power of the financial sector. I’m all for that. But my guess is that this isn’t really key. I think people just get scared when times are bad, and hate the idea of their tax dollars going to other people. This means the answer is to assuage both their financial anxiety and their perception that their money is being spent on the poor. So how about something that dramatically makes this point? Say, a one-year income tax holiday for everyone making less than $70,000 coupled with explicit promises to increase the deficit and help the poor. The tax holiday could be extended year by year as necessary, or phased out gradually.

Why something like this? Because it puts more money in everyone’s pocket and reduces their angst over money matters. It also makes it crystal clear that their money isn’t being spent on the poor. They aren’t paying any taxes, after all. Under those circumstances, helping out the poor would probably strike most people as a lovely idea.

Obviously conservatives would still oppose this, and the tax holiday wouldn’t last forever. Still, it’s worth a thought. You need something dramatic to cut through people’s fears, and this might do it.

Continued:  

Big Recessions Are Good For Right-Wing Politics

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The Rubio-Cruz War Has Begun

by AlexandFleische Posted on November 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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The simmering tension between Republican presidential rivals Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz has finally bubbled over.

On Tuesday morning, top advisers to each candidate pounded the other with the best ammunition at their disposal. The Rubio campaign slammed Cruz for a weak national security record, while a pro-Cruz group unveiled a vicious ad targeting Rubio on the issue that could become his greatest weakness in the Republican primary: immigration.

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The Rubio-Cruz War Has Begun

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Many Conservatives Are Just Fine With "Government Programs That Help the Right People"

by NHHRachelle Posted on September 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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Josh Barro has a good piece up examining whether reform conservatives like David Frum are celebrating the rise of Donald Trump. Frum & friends have long pushed for the GOP to soften its stance on entitlement reform and Trump is leading in the GOP polls while simultaneously attacking his fellow Republican candidates for wanting to cut Social Security, so his ascendency in many ways vindicates the reform conservative point that American conservatism need not be about “going Galt.”

Here is a very telling quote from Reihan Salam:

“There were a lot of people who wanted to think the Tea Party is a straightforward libertarian movement,” said Reihan Salam, the executive editor of National Review. But he said Mr. Trump’s ability to lead the polls while attacking Republicans for wanting to cut entitlement programs showed that conservative voters are open to “government programs that help the right people.”

Too true. A lot of conservatives are just fine with welfare as long as it goes to “the right people.”

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Many Conservatives Are Just Fine With "Government Programs That Help the Right People"

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Sorry, Conservatives: You Deserve Donald Trump

by ShariGottschalk Posted on September 5, 2015

Mother Jones

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From Jonah Goldberg, in an epic lament about the trumpenproletariat’s crush on Donald Trump and the willingness of mainstream conservatives to pander to it:

Every principle used to defend Trump is subjective, graded on a curve. Trump is like a cat trained to piss in a human toilet. It’s amazing! It’s remarkable! Yes, yes, it is: for a cat. But we don’t judge humans by the same standard.

I think this is unfair to cats who learn to piss in the toilet. At least that’s a useful skill, and at least they don’t spend all their free time bragging about it. Still, fair point.

On a related note, I continue to be impressed at the number of conservatives who are aghast not at Trump per se, but at the fact that the conservative base is so enamored of him. Most conservative support of Trump is “venting and resentment pretending to be some kind of higher argument,” Goldberg says. And then: “I am tempted to believe that Donald Trump’s biggest fans are not to be relied upon in the conservative cause.” Ya think?

But surely Goldberg understands that this is the right-wing base that he and his colleagues have built? I don’t expect any conservative writer to acknowledge this in public, but surely in the occasional dark night of the soul they understand what they’ve done? For years they’ve supported the worst know-nothing bombast of Drudge and Limbaugh, the casual reality distortion of Fox News, and the resentment-based appeals of people like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. And they’ve turned a blind eye to even worse: birthers, Agenda 21 lunacy, Cliven Bundy’s army, and much, much more. It was handy at the time, and helped win a few elections. But now the outrage-based mob they’ve nurtured has come back to haunt them—and unsurprisingly, it turns out not to care all that much about the debating-hall nuances of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk. They just want to kick out the wetbacks and get back at those smug liberals who make fun of them.

Live by the sword, die by the sword. But if you want to survive, you’d better at least understand that once forged, a sword can be wielded by anyone strong enough to grab it. You might not like it when your army decides to follow, but you’re the one who taught them to follow the shiny object without worrying too much about whose hand is on the hilt, aren’t you?

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Sorry, Conservatives: You Deserve Donald Trump

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Blaming Culture Is a Liberal Thing? Seriously?

by xfz0119 Posted on August 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over at National Review, Charles Cooke writes about the gruesome murder of WDBJ reporters Alison Parker and Adam Ward on Wednesday:

As I have written over and over again during the last few years, I do not believe that we can learn a great deal from the justifications that are forwarded by public killers….Mine, however, is not the only view out there. Indeed, there is a sizeable contingent within the United States that takes the question of what murderers purport to believe extremely seriously indeed. It is because of these people that we had to examine “toxic masculinity” in the wake of the Isla Vista shooting….etc.

….Half-joking on Twitter, the Free Beacon’s Sonny Bunch reacted to this news by observing that, “instead of going on a killing spree, this guy should’ve gotten a columnist gig at the Guardian.” As with all humor, there is some truth at the root of this barb….For what reason is this guy exempt? Why do we not need to have a “national conversation” about hypersensitivity?

The answer, I imagine, is politics, for this instinct seems only to run one way.

Generally speaking, I agree with Cooke. Crazy people are always going to find something to justify their worldview, and they’re going to find it somewhere out in the real world. The fact that any particular crazy person decides to have it in for the IRS or Greenpeace or women who laughed at him in high school doesn’t mean a lot. It only becomes meaningful if some particular excuse starts showing up a lot. Beyond that, I even agree that the culture of hypersensitivity has gotten out of hand in some precincts of the left.

That said….is Cooke kidding? This instinct only runs one way? After the Columbine massacre in 1999, Newt Gingrich denounced the “liberal political elite” for “being afraid to talk about the mess you have made, and being afraid to take responsibility for things you have done.” Conservatives have been raising Cain about the pernicious effects of Hollywood liberalism, video games, and the decline of religion for decades. Hysteria about the counterculture and liberal moral decay goes back at least to the 60s. I could go on endlessly in this vein, but I don’t want to bore you.

Complaining about the effects of liberal culture—whether on shooters specifically, crime more generally, or on all of society—has been a right-wing mainstay for as long as I’ve been alive. The left may be catching up, but it still has a ways to go.

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Blaming Culture Is a Liberal Thing? Seriously?

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If the EPA relaxes deadlines for CO2 cuts, will the U.S. still be able to keep its climate promises?

by EusebiaBailey Posted on July 29, 2015

If the EPA relaxes deadlines for CO2 cuts, will the U.S. still be able to keep its climate promises?

By on 29 Jul 2015 3:53 pmcommentsShare

Like pigeons to bread crumbs, climate hawks have been pecking for final details on President Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Now, in what is perhaps slightly more loaf than crumb, there’s some actual news: Sources familiar with the plan report that the timeline for its implementation will likely be extended.

The plan, which is expected to be finalized next week, will require CO2 emission cuts from coal-fired power plants and will allow states to craft their own strategies for reaching specific emissions targets. The original proposal, released last June, asked for states to begin making cuts by 2020. Sources now suggest the date will be pushed out to 2022. States are also expected to be given an extra year, up from 2017 to 2018, to submit their action plans.

The extended timeline could give rise to a potential problem: The United States just told the U.N. that it would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 26–28 percent of 2005 levels by 2025. Which is pretty soon — especially if states have longer to curb their power plant emissions. The Clean Power Plan is a major mechanism for hitting the target the U.S. submitted to the U.N., so the more time states have to draw up and adhere to new standards, the more difficult it could be for the country to follow through on its pledge.

The U.S.’s commitment, submitted in advance of the climate negotiations that will take place in Paris this December, is regarded as ambitious but achievable by those familiar with the lay of the emissions landscape. Referred to in climate negotiation parlance as an Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC), the U.S.’s emissions target is one of 22 pledges (of varying degrees of ambition) put forth by countries around the world and the European Union. Success of the INDC process — and of the Paris negotiations in general — hinges on participating countries’ abilities to implement their pledges at home. Uncertainty around the Clean Power Plan’s implementation demonstrates again the tight coupling between international negotiations and domestic politics.

As The New York Times notes, the Clean Power Plan has already been subject to a steady stream of Republican and industry attacks:

Several coal-producing states and business groups like the United States Chamber of Commerce are already preparing to file suit against the rules, in a legal clash that is widely expected to end up before the Supreme Court.

The looser deadline came after states and electric utilities spent months appealing to the E.P.A. for more time to comply. The leaders of major electric utilities warned that the tighter timeline could threaten electric reliability, saying that the race to shut down polluting plants and rapidly replace them with wind and solar plants and miles of new transmission lines could lead to rolling blackouts and brownouts.

Conservatives and the utility industry have also been warning that electric bills could soar under the plan, disproportionately affecting the poor. A recent report, however, suggested that early state compliance with the plan coupled with clean energy investment and energy efficiency action could actually reduce residential electricity bills. Another report by a coalition of smart grid and energy companies from earlier this year argued that GOP and industry warnings about grid reliability are overstated, and that plenty of strategies exist to avoid blackouts.

Without knowing further details, though, it’s difficult to say whether the date extension will constitute a net weakening of the new power plant rules. Anonymous officials familiar with the discussions told The New York Times that the extended timeframe could be balanced by tighter requirements in other sections of the plan. The final plan might also include incentives for states to beat the deadlines. We could find out as early as Monday.

Source:
Later Deadline Expected in Obama’s Climate Plan

, The New York Times.

Timing is the element most likely to change in EPA’s final Clean Power Plan

, ClimateWire.

Sources: EPA will ease deadlines on pollution rule to help states comply

, The Washington Post.

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If the EPA relaxes deadlines for CO2 cuts, will the U.S. still be able to keep its climate promises?

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AFFH: What You Need to Know to Keep Up With the Latest Right-Wing Outrage

by VirgilioWjd Posted on July 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Conservatives have a whole laundry list of stuff they’re outraged about: Benghazi, Fast & Furious, Agenda 21, Obamaphones, etc. etc. So what’s the latest from the right wing? Stanley Kurtz tells us:

Conservative opinion has been alive with outrage over AFFH for a month now.

Huh. Never heard of it. But a few minutes of Googling will get me up to speed. Hold on a bit.

OK. So it turns out that the Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlaws most of the obvious forms of housing discrimination, and has done a relatively good job of enforcing discrimination rules since then. However, it also requires the Department of Housing and Urban Development to run its programs in a way that affirmatively furthers fair housing. That is, if a local community is heavily segregated, it has to affirmatively try to reduce that segregation in order to qualify for HUD funds.

It turns out that HUD hasn’t done much of anything about this particular aspect of the law, and President Obama would like them to start. So a couple of years ago HUD started developing guidelines called, uncreatively, “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.” Last year they released a tool for assessing segregation and fair housing choice that can be used by community planners, and a few days ago they released the final 377-page rule.

That’s the basics. It’s surprisingly hard to get more because Google returns almost exclusively either (a) evaluations of AFFH by civil rights and fair housing groups, or (b) outraged rants from conservative outlets. Ordinary newspapers seem to have little interest (or, as Kurtz puts it, “The mainstream press has been straining to avoid AFFH”).

Obviously I’m not going to pretend to be an instant expert now that I’ve read half a dozen pieces about AFFH, but basically the concrete goals seem to be (1) providing communities with data regarding the racial, ethnic and income distribution of housing in their towns; (2) encouraging and funding affordable housing in prosperous areas; and (3) pressing communities to change zoning rules that promote segregation.

Will it work? Hard to say. HUD’s only tool for enforcing its guidelines is to withhold money for HUD programs if communities don’t comply. However, prosperous communities don’t get much HUD funding in the first place, which means HUD has little leverage in high-income suburbs. They’ll probably be able to almost entirely avoid the long arm of HUD tyranny.

Anyway, that’s that. Mostly I just wanted to let everyone know that this thing called AFFH is the latest outrage among the conservative base. It fits in perfectly with their hysteria over Agenda 21 and their general belief that Obama wants to round up every well-off white person in the country and pack them like sardines into high-rise buildings in big cities. Now you know.

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AFFH: What You Need to Know to Keep Up With the Latest Right-Wing Outrage

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on AFFH: What You Need to Know to Keep Up With the Latest Right-Wing Outrage